Sharply, in the silence, a cry rang out. Ethan leaped to his feet.
"It"s only the ghost," said Val, quietly.
"Of course--Yaffti. But what on earth--"
"Yaffti?"
"I heard it as a child, and called it "Yaffti." What the devil is it?"
"Only the clumsy old lightning-rod shrieking in its rusty fixtures when the wind blows."
"How do you know?"
"I lay on the rug here and listened, and then walked round and round the house in the wind till I found out what it was made the crying sound."
"Weren"t you frightened?"
"Oh yes, dreadfully."
"H"m! So Yaffti turns out to be the spirit of the blast!"
"I was awfully disappointed. I hoped it was a real ghost. Why did you call it Yaffti?"
"Oh, well, what would you call it if you didn"t call it Yaffti?"
She laughed.
"I"m forgetting you hate the gloaming. I must go and tell Venie to bring the coal, and--"
"Don"t go!" he said, suddenly, holding out a hand.
She laughed, a little nervously.
"I believe you"re afraid of the dark."
"Yes, little cousin, I"ve always been afraid of the dark."
She moved away towards the door.
"Val!" The voice seemed to fall on her naked heart, and made it shrink deliciously. "Val!"
"Yes," she said, hardly above a whisper.
Was anything else said? She never knew. She remembered nothing but groping blindly two or three steps, and then suddenly realizing that she was going towards him in the dusk with shaking, outstretched hands. For what? "Oh, G.o.d! what am I doing?" She wheeled about with a sharp inward twist of mortification. Blessing the kindly dark, she made for the door.
"Don"t go!" said the voice.
"Only to get the light," she said, clinging to the door-k.n.o.b, shaken into trembling from crown to toe.
"It"s not dark, little cousin, while you"re here."
She did not stir--nor he. The clock ticked loud. The wind had risen and was howling like a beaten hound. How curious, thought the man, vaguely, that the natural sounds of wind, or sea, or falling inland waters, or the voices of night creatures, are all sad or else discordant. Surely, surely the spirit of the world is the spirit of plaint and dole.
"Val!"
"Yes, cousin Ethan."
"You are too far off. Bring the light nearer."
She heard steps creaking down the stair. Or was it only that Yaffti turned and strained in his rusty fetters? The door was hurriedly opened.
"Why are you two sitting in the dark?" said John Gano.
"We"ve been telling ghost stories," said Ethan, as Val slipped out.
CHAPTER XXII
Mrs. Gano sat with Emmie that evening in the long room. The little girl had been having restless nights, and had fallen asleep just before supper. Val went alone into the parlor after that meal, and waited for the two men to join her. They were smoking in the dining-room--a thing unprecedented. They stayed a long time. Eight o"clock--nine o"clock--nearly ten. Val lay down on the sofa in the shadow behind the big arm-chair, so worn out with emotion she fell asleep. By-and-by, through the mist of her dreaming, the low sound of voices broke: her father"s, with that familiar note of weary cheerfulness, and now another, deep, vibrant, full of mutiny and music. She lay a moment with shut eyes, her half-awakened senses luxuriously steeped in the sound, careless of the meaning. Now her father answered. Ah, how long his insistent staccato kept striking the troubled air. It was plain he was in one of his talking moods, when there was no stopping him, just as for days--sometimes for weeks--there would be no such thing as getting more than "Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," across his tightened lips. She was dropping off to sleep again when suddenly Ethan"s voice stabbed her broad awake, saying:
"The world is a cruel place, the world is an evil place, _ergo_, I hate the world."
"No, no, you"re wrong," said John Gano. "You"re blind if you don"t see the world is beautiful, is rooted in triumphing good."
Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear, hear!"
"I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a den of thieves."
"Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don"t agree--"
"It does _not_ come to the same thing. There"s all the difference in what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for better men than we."
Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head.
"When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out, when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Even _you_," his uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice--"even you may live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my neighbor"s children"s children will be when they have ocular proof and daily profit of it."
"I wish I were as sure of it as you."
"My boy, you"ve only to look about you. Mind, I don"t say _within_. No, no"--his voice dragged--"one sees there one"s own failures and defeats, and one is blinded to the larger good. I"m no sentimentalist, either."
He flared up. "I"m not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of this harvest. But come!"--he pulled his shambling figure out of the chair and stood before the fire almost erect--"life is n.o.bler than men thought. Some men"s share is to see, before they stumble into the dark, the light that other men shall walk by--see it, and tell the shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand."
"And those who stumbled before the light came near enough?"
"Oh, well, at most they "fell on sleep.""